Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) (33 page)

“What are those?” Lane asks pointing at the cylinders Brinkley pulls from his backpack.

“More tear gas canisters,” he says. “I’m going to throw one in each direction and draw them out. Have the gun up and ready. When I say
run
, you take off toward Jesse’s tree. Don’t stop for anything.”

“But what about Jeremiah and Nikki?” My voice echoes in my mask. “And what about Gloria?”

“She’ll be safe here,” he says. He puts a mask over Gloria’s face, checking the nozzle for the sound of her breath. “If they wanted her dead they would’ve shot her, not sedated her.’’

“And what about them!” I gesture to Nikki and Jeremiah again.

“They’ll have to protect themselves,” Brinkley says. “You’re the one that said they could.”

“You’re a jerk,” I say. When I look back Nikki and Jeremiah have disappeared. They must have realized what Brinkley was doing and fell back. “Why didn’t you give them masks?”

“I don’t have any more.”

“This is not how you work in groups!” I yell. “And this gas will probably kill the trees!”

“Fucking hippy liberals,” Brinkley grumbles. “We can come back and plant 50 trees and nurse the baby squirrels back to health if you want, but if we don’t get Jesse out of the ground
now
before Caldwell or full dark gets here, we won’t even be alive enough to do that.”

Point taken.

“Ready. In 3….2….”

My heart is hammering in my throat, making it hard to breathe and swallow and I feel like I’m suffocating in the mask. I feel Lane’s hand tighten on my backpack.

“…1…
Go
!”

Lane yanks me up and I’m running.

Jesse

I
can no longer tell the difference between reality and my dreams. Part of me understands I am in a box, underground, in some sort of panic-induced trance. The other part of me believes I am seventeen, suicidal and reliving the last few hours of my life.

When I get home from school that day, on the last day of my life, I barricade my bedroom door. I pull my desk and chair over to block the door. I pile on my books, possessions, everything with weight, on top of the desk. My mother comes to the door at dinner time and I tell her I have a headache and just want to sleep.

Underneath the bed is a small wooden box. It was my paternal grandmother’s jewelry box. When she died my dad took the box and then he gave it to me for Christmas when I was eight. It was the last present he gave me.

Inside the box is a bottle of my mother’s antidepressants.
25mg QTY: 100.

The cold light of winter filters through my curtains, the single oak behind it gnarled and bare. The grass dead and yellow beneath the white sky. I listen to my mother in the kitchen, the clang of pots and pans as my brother’s baby voice chatter harmonized with the smell of something meaty. I think
I won’t remember her voice. Danny’s laugh. I’ll be dead and won’t remember anything.

I’m half right.

I watch the old oak through the window as the white day gives way to the red of sunset. My room grows dark but I don’t turn on the light. Instead, I pull the darkness around me like a blanket and take my first pill. I lose count at 18, feeding them one after the other down my throat and chasing them with a sip of alcohol that burns my nose and stings my throat.

My father loved a good rum and Coke.

When I’d found an old bottle of rum in the back of the pantry shortly after turning twelve, I’d put it under my bed, inside an empty Hello Kitty suitcase. It’s what I used to wash each pill down. One after another until my limbs grew too heavy to lift. I still held the jewelry box as I crawled into the bed and leaned my hot forehead against the cold glass of the window pane.

The door rattles. The desk bucks and a pile of soft back books slide off the surface and hit the floor. Another push and the desk rocks back again.

Taking the alcohol with me, I slide open the bedroom window.

It’s hard to get the latch to give with thick fingers and only one hand. The desk behind me inches back, further and further. A crack then a sliver. Then enough for a foot, a hand, and elbow.

The window gives and I crawl through. I hit the dirt on my hands and knees. The bottle rolls and spills but I pick it up. The impact against the cold earth jars me but I can’t feel much. I push through thick sludge with my limbs mostly numb from the cold. My legs and arms aren’t working at full capacity as I pull myself and the bottle up. My shoulder bumps and slides over the grooved paneling of the back of our house as I stumble forward. I hear him behind me, hissing from the window but I keep moving. Step after step until the edge of the house gives way and I stumble again.

The barn’s soft motion light comes on. It isn’t even a real barn for animals or something like that. My dad erected it as a place to keep his cars and a place to work on his cars when his friends needed an oil change or a belt replaced. Somewhere he could do the work without charging his boss’s price.

And somehow I make it there and fall into the golden strands of hay still clutching my father’s rum. The cars are gone and the hay is only here to mask the scent of oil Eddie hates so much.

My whole body is heavy with the gravity of one

thousand suns and softens into the mound of hay.

Until I feel the hands on me. Until he is turning me over and trying to shove his fingers down my throat.

“No,” I groan. I don’t want to be brought back. Especially not to him.

I turn and hurl into the hay and he pulls me up by the hair but I can’t stand. I am on my knees, nearly unconscious, and he is fooling with his pants.

No
.

I turn the bottle of booze over and wet the hay with it. And then—

No
—Gabriel interrupts my dream memory. He walks into the dream barn in his beautiful black suit, black wings unfurling behind him in all of their glory. Those eyes, jaguar green behind his fallen black hair, hold me entranced. He moves around the slow motion of Eddie burning, screaming, his mouth open in horror but no sound coming out save Gabriel’s voice.

You must remember it the way it happened.

Gabriel forces me back. Back to my bedroom counting the branches of the oak tree.

For each oak limb I take a pill and a sip of rum.

I am almost asleep when the door bucks and bulges. It is the sound of the books hitting the floor that sends me out the window.

In the barn, he covers my mouth with his sweaty palm. The stink of him: the sweat and tobacco on his breath makes my stomach turn.

He pushes me down onto the hay.

He shoves his fingers down my throat and I am forced to turn my head and puke. Again and again.

“—do you hear me?” he says.

He shoves his fat fingers down my throat again. And I bite him. Hard until I feel the blood from those bloated knuckles hit the back of my throat.

“No.” I spat the blood onto the dirty barn floor.

He jumps back and shakes his bleeding hand. “You little bitch.”

The world is still spinning and I know I’ve taken too many pills to be saved no matter how many times this fat, stinking pervert forces me to throw up. He might believe he’s gotten them out of me, but my body tells me otherwise. Or maybe he doesn’t know about the pills at all—only the booze.

He undoes the belt on his work pants and yanks the leather from its loops. “What did you say?”

“No.” My word slurs but it felt good to say it, to get the word out without a wad of mattress suffocating me. To hear it echo, full-bodied in the air. “No. No.
No
—”

Something connected with the side of my head. The pain is too sharp to be the flat sting of a leather strap. It isn’t until I see the buckle trail through the

dirt that I realize which end connected.

“The answer is still no.” I gag. My body wants to puke up the pills and alcohol as much as Eddie wants me to.

I am dry heaving when he slams my back flat against the barn floor. My bare feet land in the soft hay just as all the breath goes out of me.

Remember me, Jesse. Remember what it felt like.

“No,” I whisper in the darkness of my coffin.

I will protect you.

“I burned the barn with a match.”

No,
Gabriel insists.
Remember me.

Eddie’s hands yank at my jeans, pausing only long enough to give me a hard slap across the face when I fight back. The stench of him and the barn choke me as much as his thick hand. The rafters above blur in and out of focus.

Let me in Jesse.

“I can’t,” I cry, rubbing my hand over the rough wood of the box.

My fear consumes me in this living burial. It rolls me like a wave over and over as I brace against it.

Then it is as if the bottom of the coffin is a trap door opened and I am falling. Down and down into a cold dark and just like the night in the burning barn when I saw—

But Gabriel won’t give up on me.
What do you see?

An impossibly beautiful man with bright, inhumanly green eyes. They blaze like torchlight in his

skull as his black wings extend out on either side of him. Crow’s wings in flight, so beautiful, gliding toward me. I am fighting Eddie and losing. Fighting until this beautiful man says—

I am your strength.

And I—

Open your arms and I will catch you, Jesse.

Lying on the barn floor beneath Eddie I stretch open my arms and Gabriel takes me. He fills me with a coursing power, a vibrating electric fire like the soft warmth of a sunny day, starting in my chest and then fills me to the brim.

“No,” I whisper. I look Eddie in the eye, his red rimmed, unfocused eyes. “No more.”

The flame ignites. Not by a match or spark, but from me.
I
ignite. And Eddie’s shirt is caught and blazes up as if wet with gasoline. He jumps back screaming and wailing and trips over my extended leg into the soft hay pile, which erupts as if firebombed.

Gabriel’s strength is enough to help me stand and walk as if my body isn’t dying at all. As if the bottle of rum and bottle of pills, the last inheritance from my living parents, haven’t carried me over Death’s doorway. I watch flames unfurl around him, eating the hay and the wall behind it. Then it takes the rafters one by one—so quickly—as thick black smoke rolling through like storm clouds across the plains before tearing open the roof and revealing a starlit sky.

But I am not in the barn anymore. I am in this God awful coffin with Gabriel’s power rolling through me and I feel like I will burst. My skin wants to stretch in all directions, crawling with the power.

But I can still see him.

Him—dream Gabriel or real Gabriel, I don’t know because the memory and the waking nightmare have become one or were always one—he walks past the enflamed man and comes toward me. He takes a slow step then another. A drumming sound begins deep in my chest. It fills my head up and gets louder and louder. Each pulse in time with his approaching step. But as the planks from the barn ceiling fall and come crashing down on me, I fall with them. I fall through the black side of twilight. And Gabriel dives from the burning barn into the depths to catch me. His wings stretch out on either side of him as his ivory fingers reach toward me.

But I am falling so fast. A great rushing wind tearing at my hair and face.

I don’t want to die,
I tell him. I don’t know how my voice can carry through such a dark place. And I don’t know when the bottom of this fathomless cavern might come, when my back might finally connect with cold, unforgiving stone.

I reach toward him and our fingers brush.
Don’t let me die.

He grabs ahold of my wrist and pulls me into his arms. Those black feathers smell like rain come to quench the fire. He envelops me in softness and holds me against his cold chest, soothing the blaze of the fire against my face.

Please,
I whisper again.
If I die
—

I will never let that happen.
Gabriel brings his lips to mine and breathes life into me once more.

Ally

B
rinkley lets out a battle cry and hurls an open tear gas canister into the trees. Then the sound of another canister cutting through foliage, whipping through branches. And another.

Immediately the gunfire starts. Just as Lane and I fall into the shadow of the oak, I see someone stumble out of the woods. Brinkley, on one knee in the field, shoots him in the chest. A burst of blood blooms red through the bad guy’s shirt and he goes down.

Lane’s heavy arm prevents me from rising too high off the ground.

Brinkley is down on one knee, crouching low and picking off the guys who emerge from the smoking trees. Coughing, hacking their lungs up. But Brinkley doesn’t see the one stumbling up from behind him. The one gagging, but trying to steady his weapon on the back of Brinkley’s head at the same. I raise my gun and shoot.